The Tree Where Man Was Born

  Nobody spoke. When Oria pointed out more arboreal lions, we ignored her. I felt angry and depressed—angry at having our lives risked so unreasonably, and depressed because I had permitted it to happen, as if I had lacked the courage to admit fear. At camp, I said in sour tones, “Well, you got some fantastic pictures, I’ll say that much.” And Iain, looking cross himself, said shortly, “I’ll never use them—those were for her scrapbook. I can’t stand pictures of frightened animals.” Two years before a friend of Iain had given him a book of mine on travels in wild parts of South America, and now he commented that I had taken a few risks myself. But calculated risks to reach a goal were quite different from risks taken for their own sake; I was thinking of George Schaller’s account of his solitary camp in the grizzly tundra of Alaska, and the care he had taken, the awareness of every step on river stones, of each swing of his ax—the disciplined courage that it took to live alone in wilderness where any mistake might be the last. What we had just done, by comparison, was merely stupid.

  For once, Iain failed to argue. He was silent for a while, then said abruptly that he expected to die violently, as his father had, and doubted very much that he would live to see his fortieth year. Should he maintain his present habits, this romantic prediction will doubtless be borne out. “I’d hate to die,” he said on another occasion, “but I’d rather risk dying than live nine-to-five.” Yet people like Iain who hurl themselves at life with such generous spirit seem to rush untouched through danger after danger, as if the embrace of death as part of life made them immortal.

  Months later, when his work at Manyara had ended, Iain came with Oria to America. We discussed elephants and the fine days at Ndala, arriving eventually at the adventure with the lioness. “Those times with the elephants weren’t really dangerous,” he said; he glared at Oria when she laughed. “Honestly. I knew what I was doing. But that business with the lion was absurd.” He shrugged, and after a pause said quietly, “We just did it out of love of life.”

  At Ndala I lived happily in a thatch-roofed banda, like an African beehive hut with windows and a cement floor. The hut was perched on the high river bank just beside the falls, which washed away all noises but the clear notes of forest birds. Sometimes I climbed the stream above the falls, with its hidden rock pools and small sandy beaches shaded by figs and tamarind, and massive boulders of the ancient rock of Africa laid bare by the torrents of the rainy season. In the winter, a pair of Egyptian geese flew each day into the ravines above the falls; one watched them appear out of the sun over Manyara and vanish into the Rift wall.

  In the ground-water forest, a green monitor lizard, four feet long, crosses a brook, and the speckled Charaxes butterflies flicker through the shades. In an open glade a fastidious impala lifts its hind leg to shed big drops of rain. At daybreak a dog baboon, taking his ease atop a termitarium, picks his breakfast from a plucked branch of red berries; finding himself observed, he cocks his head, then dismisses his fellow hominoid with a cynical nod. At evening a white-browed coucal, called the water-bottle bird, neck feathers raised, whole body shuddering, delivers that liquid falling song that only intensifies the stillness.

  In the winter drought of 1961, Manyara was a pale dead place of scum froth and cracked soda; in 1969 and 1970 the water level was so high that many of the tracks behind the shore were underwater, and much of the umbrella thorn was killed. At twilight one late afternoon near the drowned forest, a herd of elephants fed on mats of dead typha sedge blown over from the far side of the lake. The animals waded to their chests in the greasy waves, trunks coiling in and out, ears blowing. Night was falling in the shadows of the Rift, which rose in a black wall behind the elephants, and from dusky woods came a solitary fluting. As the sun sank to the escarpment, the western sky took on a greenish cast, and the last light of storm caught the whiskers on the pointed lips, the torn flutings of the ears, the ragged switch of a wet tail on ancient hide. The dead forest, the doomed giants, the wild light were of another age, and made me restless, as if awakening ancestral memories of the Deluge.

  VIII

  GREAT CALDRON MOUNTAINS

  There is a void in the life of the African, a spiritual emptiness, divorced as he is from each world, standing in between, torn in both directions. To go forward is to abandon the past in which the roots of his being have their nourishment; to go backward is to cut himself off from the future, for there is no doubt about where the future lies. The African has been taught to abandon his old ways, yet he is not accepted in the new world even when he has mastered its ways. There seems to be no bridge, and this is the source of his terrible loneliness.

  —COLIN TURNBULL, The Lonely African

  . . . a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, came out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.

  —ISAK DINESEN, Out of Africa

  Between Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru, off the road that winds around the side of Ngurdoto Crater, are soft ponds where hippos push and blow, and here vast beds of floating vegetation, papyrus and pale sky blue petals of nymphea drifting with the wind, may cause a pond to form or vanish before one returns along the road: I noticed this one afternoon while walking homeward to Momela. On my left as I went along, the clouds lifted from the shattered side of black Mt. Meru, revealing the jagged walls and the great cinder cone of its exploded crater. Before long, I heard the somber crack of a snapped branch, and rounding a bend, found my path barred by elephants. They were feeding on both sides, and one stood foursquare on the road, legs like stone columns. I was sorry about this, as dark was coming, and there was an elephant in this region that last year, having been approached incautiously, destroyed John Owen’s friend, Baron Von Blumenthal. But Desmond Vesey-FitzGerald, who had seen these elephants earlier and anticipated the confrontation, came to fetch me. I was glad to see his Land Rover, for night came down before we reached his camp.

  Vesey, who is the ecologist for Tanzania’s national parks, had been kind enough to invite me to Momela, at the foot of Mt. Meru, to learn some “bush botany” from himself and his dear friend Mary Richards, a beautiful Welsh lady of eighty-three who, like Vesey himself, had transferred her botanical field work into Tanzania when the political situation in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, became a nuisance. (“Can’t tell what they’ll ask you at the borders anymore—doubt if they know themselves. Used to ask what sex your wife was—probably still do.”) But Vesey and Mary were much too busy to bemoan the passing of the grand old days, for he was completing his work on East African grasses, while she was negotiating the purchase of a new Land Rover for a botanical safari into the remote plains behind Kilimanjaro. She had brought along from Zambia her cook Samuel, and as Vesey already had two Samuels in residence, and as these old friends are much given to good-humored shouting, their household is a lively place. Three Samuels or none might appear when one was called, whereas Vesey’s cook Chilufia was apt to be there whether wanted or not, agitating in stricken silence for a chance to lay bare a calamity. The gloom of Chilufia is eternal as fire or water, and would no doubt be passed on from father to son.

  “That banana pudding, Chilufia! We don’t wish to see that again!”

  And Chilufia rolls a yellow eye in resignation; one suspects Chilufia of laughter in the dark.

  Toward Africans, Vesey and Mary have the good will of the earlier generations, recognizing the dignity and loyalty and courage with which Africans repay respectful treatment. Their manner is one of mixed love and exasperation, and just as the African eases his nerves with laughter at the mzungu, the European, so Vesey calms his own, when he can manage it, by laughing at the blacks. Because there is mutual loyalty in this household, blacks and whites may amuse one another in a way that is forgiven on both sides.

  “. . . frightfully smart! Stumbling about on the stones, slapping his r
ifle butt about—practically knocked himself down!” Vesey’s cheeks, in mirth, are merry and red and round, under round glasses. “Didn’t you see him? Trouble was, he’d lost his gun sling again, had his rifle all tied up with a fearful bit of string. . . .”

  Vesey and Mary are pioneer African botanists, self-taught, and they are spirited competitors, decrying each other’s botanical techniques, deploring the absence of word from “Kew” (the British Botanical Museum at Kew Gardens), fussing over each other’s needs, such as proper tags and a decent supply of “polly bags” for collecting specimens. In the evening, over a stiff drink, they compare notes, recalling old times in Abercorn, and old friends like Ionides, called “Iodine,” and J. A. Hunter, the hunter and game warden, and Wilfred Thesiger, the desert traveler, and Peter Greenway, the eminent botanist at the Coryndon (for their generation, Nairobi’s National Museum, which acquired its new name at the time of Independence, will always be the Coryndon, just as this land will always be Tanganyika). In the back buildings of the Coryndon, I once met Dr. Greenway, a dogged bachelor in baggy plus fours and bow tie who was kind enough to sort out a crude collection I had made in the Dahlak Islands in the Red Sea; he is of the same vintage, more or less, as Mary Richards, and was greatly annoyed at young Vesey for failing to stay in touch with him. “I don’t know what Vesey thinks he’s doing down there,” Dr. Greenway said, “but you may be sure it isn’t botany.”

  I lived in a tent west of the house, which overlooks the Momela Lakes, in a saddle of green hills under Mt. Meru. Looking northeast toward Kilimanjaro, there is a broad prospect of the N’gare N’erobi region where Joseph Thomson of the Royal Geographic Society first met with the Maasai; Thomson, in 1883, was the first European to cross Maasai Land to Lake Victoria and return. “We soon set our eyes upon the dreaded warriors that had been so long the subject of my waking dreams, and I could not but involuntarily exclaim, ‘What splendid fellows!’ as I surveyed a band of the most peculiar race of men to be found in Africa.” But soon the Maasai were behaving with the aggressive arrogance for which they are well known, and two days later, having gotten word that the Maasai in the country ahead were up in arms, Thomson felt obliged to beat a retreat around the south side of Kilimanjaro. Originally he had planned to go west over the Nguruman region to the lake, but now he was deflected, coming around by way of Loitokitok and Amboseli and heading northwest to Naivasha, Lake Baringo, and Kusumu on a route very close to today’s main road from Namanga to these destinations. En route, he named the Aberdare Mountains for the president of the society that had sponsored him and a lovely falls in honor of himself.

  It has been said that Thomson’s peril was exaggerated by the Chagga people of the foothills of Kilimanjaro, who hoped to relieve him of the trading goods intended for the Maasai. The Chagga were and are today an intelligent, ambitious tribe of Bantu-speaking cultivators who practiced irrigation in the rich highlands; like the Kikuyu, they were driven inland from the coast by northern invaders and they, too, are supposed to have displaced a small race of men with big bows and unintelligible speech, who were driven higher and higher on Mt. Kilimanjaro and eventually vanished. Subsequently the Chagga were harassed by the Maasai and displaced by Europeans, yet later became the most powerful tribe in the country. Whether the Chagga and Kikuyu got control of the best land because they are intelligent and ambitious, or whether their intelligence and ambition is a consequence of favorable environment and good nutrition would make an interesting study.

  At daybreak, through the tent fly, I could see giraffe heads swaying over the small rises around camp, like giant flowers shot up overnight; the bell note of a boubou shrike distills the windless morning. Giraffes gaze raptly, one ear flicking, before moving off in that elegant slow rhythm that is tuned to the old music of the elephants. Elephants, too, convene here in the night, and sometimes buffalo, chewing their cud as they contemplate man’s habitations. Below the camp, the water trails of courting coot melt the surface of Momela, and beyond the lakes, in a realm of shadow, Kilimanjaro’s base forms a pedestal for its high cumulus. Birds fly from this dark world into the sunlight of Momela—a quartet of crowned cranes, wild horn note calling from across the water, and ducks that hurry down the clouds—pintail, Cape widgeon, Hottentot teal. In rain, the lakes have the monotone alpine cast of mountain lakes across the high places of the world, but here the monotone is pierced by fierce rays of African color—a rainbow in a purple sky, an emilia blossom, tropic orange, or a carmine feather, drifted down from a diadem of birds crossing the heavens in the last shreds of sunset.

  His people tell of a young Bushman who came upon a rock pool in the desert. Kneeling to drink, he saw reflected in the pool a red bird more brilliant than anything he had ever seen on earth. Determined to hold it in his hand, he sprang up with his bow, but there was no sign of the red bird in the sere desert sky. Wandering from place to place, inquiring after the vanished bird, he strayed farther and farther from his homeland. Days gathered into months and years, and in this way, without ever having found what he was seeking, he became old. He had hunted the land over, and talked to the few who might have glimpsed the bird as well as the many who had not, and still his heart could not give up the search. At last, on the point of turning home, he heard that the red bird had been seen from the peak of the north mountain, and he took up his bow and resumed his journey one more time. The mountain was far away across a desert, and when he reached the foothills the old hunter was mortally tired. With the end of his strength, he climbed and climbed into the sky, and on the peak he lay down upon his back, for he was dying. One last time he gazed into the distances, hoping to glimpse the splendid thing in the mountain sky. But the sky was empty, and he sighed and closed his eyes, wondering if his life had been in vain, and died with the sun upon his eyelids and a vision of the bird as he had seen it long ago, reflected in the bright pool of his childhood. And as he died, a feather of a burning red drifted down from the great sky, coming to rest in his still hand.1

  Dark Meru is gaunt in a pearly sun that illumines the high shards of the blasted crater, and under the peaks the cotton clouds, filling with light, nudge and nestle like balloons in the corners of the dead volcano. Meru is the fifth highest mountain in all Africa, and may once have been highest of all. It is dormant, not extinct; it may have erupted as recently as 1879. An earlier explosion collapsed this eastern wall, and the glacier or crater lake cascaded down the mountain; the walls, still crumbling, raise clouds of dust on windless days.

  On the northeast flank of Meru lies a mountain wilderness still relatively unexplored called the Chaperro. I went there with Vesey and John Beasley, the warden of Ngurdoto, and two askaris of the Meru tribe, Serekieli and Frank. A certain Podocarpus species with a finer bark pattern than the more common species occurs on Kilimanjaro, and Vesey was anxious to find out if it was native to Mt. Meru as well. Podocarpus belongs to a primitive group of conifers related to the yews and, with the East African cedar, forms forests of relict evergreens well over one hundred feet tall. These big trees, in East Africa, are now confined to Meru, Kilimanjaro, and Mt. Kenya.

  There is a track up into the crater that crosses the fallen crater wall, and one is able to drive a vehicle with four-wheel drive to eighty-four hundred feet, where the forest opens out into a black lava tumulus, with a true montane flora of such Palearctic forms as heath, barberry, crotalaria, bracken fern, and usnea. Under the peak called Little Meru, where elephants mount stolidly to heights of eleven thousand feet, the track works around the rim to the northern face. Here we would descend through the high forest. In the silver sun of the crater mists, a dusky flycatcher, silver gray and dun, on a limb tip silvered with orchid swords and lichen, was utterly in place. This was cloud forest, with violets and buttercups, clover and geranium, and the mossy tree limbs carried ferns and yellow star flowers of stonecrop. Wild coffee and wild orange filled the clouds with scent, and here and there, like giants in the mist, stood arborescent lily and lobelia. Although animal
s wander high onto the mountain—the eland, klipspringer, and mountain reedbuck occur commonly at twelve thousand feet—the only antelope we saw on the descent was a lone bushbuck, and the birds were scarce: a bar-tailed trogon, red and blue, poised a moment on a limb, and John Beasley picked out an evergreen forest warbler and a broad-ringed white-eye at the edge of a sunny clearing. Meanwhile, we searched in vain for the uncommon conifer.

  The forest was opening into glades where the grass, cropped short, was littered with fresh buffalo dung. “They can’t be far ahead of us,” John Beasley said. Last year Beasley had two ribs broken by a buffalo that caught him as he swung into a tree; he escaped the horn tip but was struck by the heavy boss. The buffalo is said to be the most aggressive animal in Africa, much more dangerous than the rhino, since that beast will often thunder past its target and keep right on going until, at some point in its course, having met with no obstacle and having forgotten what excited it in the first place, it comes to a ponderous halt. The buffalo, on the other hand, turns quickly and is diligent in its pursuit. It is keen of nose and eye and ear, and like the lion, is very difficult to stop once it attacks, often persisting in the work of destruction for some time after the object of its rage or fear is dead. It will even stalk a man, especially when wounded, coming around on its pursuer from behind, and last year near Momela a man was killed by a lurking buffalo in his own garden.

  “Mbogo!”

  Serekieli, in the lead, was calling back to us, and a buffalo skull, as if in sign, lay in the grass, surrounded by fresh spoor. We stood and listened. Before making their move, buffalo may lie in wait until whatever approaches them has gone past. This is customarily ascribed to malevolence or low cunning, but dull wits and slow reaction time may be an alternative explanation. “If they’re good-natured, you don’t see them,” Vesey said crossly. “If they’re not, they rush out at you. Terrific nervous tension, I must say.” At sixty-two, Vesey is strong and energetic, but feels himself at a disadvantage when it comes to nipping up trees.